scendants kept up the godly and honourable
traditions of the house, and dispensed a pleasant and a kindly
hospitality to their friends in Edinburgh, from whom, at that time,
their pretty old home was somewhat distant in the country!

With such an ancestry on both sides one can easily understand the bent
of Robert Louis Stevenson's mind towards old things, the curious
traditions of Scotch family history and the lone wild moorlands,

'Where about the graves of the martyrs
The whaups are calling,'

one can comprehend, too, the attraction for him of the power and the
mystery of the sea. All these things came to him as a natural
inheritance from those who had gone before, and in the characters who
people his books, in _Kidnapped_, in _Catriona_, in _Weir of Hermiston_,
we see live again, the folk of that older Edinburgh, whom those bygone
Balfours knew.

In the fresh salt breeze that, as it were, blows keen from the sea in
_Treasure Island_, in _The Merry Men_, and about the sad house of
Durrisdeer in _The Master of Ballantrae_, we recognise the magic wooing
of the mighty ocean that made of the Stevensons builders of lighthouses
and harbours, and masters of the rough, wild coasts where the waves beat
and the spray dashes, and the sea draws all who love it to ride upon its
breast in ships.

From the union of two families who have been so long and so honourably
known in their different ways, there came much happiness, and one feels
somewhat sorry that when Louis Stevenson signed his name to the books by
which he is so lovingly remembered, he did not write it in full and
spell 'Lewis' in the old-time fashion that was good enough for our
Scotch ancestors in the days when many a 'Lewis' drew sword for Gustavus
Adolphus, or served as a gentleman volunteer in the wars of France or
the Netherlands, and when 'O, send Lewie Gordon hame' rang full of
pathos to the Scotch ears, to which the old spelling was familiar. Mr
Stevenson's Balfour relatives naturally regret the alteration of the
older spelling and the omission of his mother's family name from his
signature. With regard to the latter, he himself assured his mother that
having merely dropped out the Balfour to shorten a very long name, he
greatly regretted having done so, after it was too late, and he had won
his literary fame as 'Robert Louis Stevenson,' and much wished that he
had invariably written his name as R. L. Balfour Stevenson. The spelling
of Lewis